CNBC to Launch CNBC Rapid Update Powered by Moody's Analytics

CNBC Senior Economics Reporter Steve Liesman to Lead Coverage for CNBC Business Day Programming and CNBC.com

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J., MARCH 25, 2014—With markets moving rapidly on reams of incoming economic data, it can be dizzying for investors to make sense of it all. Which data points matter and how much do they matter?

CNBC, First in Business Worldwide, today announced the launch of CNBC Rapid Update powered by Moody's Analytics, a tool that offers a new market-wide measure of how much an economic report changes the outlook on Wall Street for U.S. growth forecasts. Moody's Analytics, a leading independent provider of economic forecasting, will be aggregating the data on behalf of CNBC. Steve Liesman, CNBC Senior Economics Reporter, will lead the coverage for CNBC Business Day programming and CNBC.com.

As the latest economic news is released, the CNBC Rapid Update will measure how the data changes the average tracking forecast among a select group of Wall Street economists for Gross Domestic Product. The economic data points include: vehicle sales, construction spending, retail sales, international trade, import prices, business inventories, consumer price index, industrial production, durable goods and personal income/spending.

"The individual releases matter most importantly because of what they say about the outlook for growth in the United States," says Liesman. "But until now there has been no systematic way for investors or economists to gauge the average view on the Street of the impact of individual data points on the big picture."

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics says, "This statistic translates the blizzard of economic data into what it means for real GDP growth. No other statistic measures the economy's overall growth in real time."

With CNBC in the U.S., CNBC in Asia Pacific, CNBC in Europe, Middle East and Africa, CNBC World and CNBC HD, CNBC is the recognized world leader in business news and provides real-time financial market coverage and business information to approximately 371 million homes worldwide, including more than 100 million households in the United States and Canada. CNBC also provides daily business updates to 400 million households across China. The network's 16 live hours a day of business programming in North America (weekdays from 4:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m. ET) is produced at CNBC's global headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and includes reports from CNBC News bureaus worldwide. CNBC at night is the all new CNBC Prime featuring a mix of new reality programming, CNBC's highly successful series produced exclusively for CNBC including "American Greed" and "Crime Inc." and a number of distinctive in-house documentaries.

CNBC also has a vast portfolio of digital products which deliver real-time financial market news and information across a variety of platforms. These include CNBC.com, the online destination for global business; CNBC PRO, the premium, integrated desktop/mobile service that provides real-time global market data and live access to CNBC global programming; and a suite of CNBC Mobile products including the CNBC Real-Time iPhone and iPad Apps.